The Iron Stallions

by Max Hennessy

  Louise looked down at her.

  ‘If someone’s liberated it means they’ve been in prison and now they’re free.’

  ‘It says Brittany and Normandy have been liberated. Have they been in prison?’

  ‘In a way, the whole of Europe’s been in prison but now we’ve liberated a lot of France and soon, I expect, we shall liberate Belgium and Holland and all the other countries.’

  ‘Is Josh in Brittany and Normandy?’

  ‘I don’t think so. He’s further north but I can’t say exactly where.’

  ‘Is the war nearly over?’

  ‘I think there’s a long way to go yet but it looks as though it will be before long.’

  ‘Will Josh come back?’

  Louise drew a deep breath. ‘Please God,’ she said.

  She had read the newspapers every day, watching progress, dreading the arrival of a telegram. Only the previous week, one had arrived for one of the Ackroyds in the village and every time she heard the postman coming up the drive, she dreaded what he might bring. When he had arrived at the beginning of August he had brought a letter from Konstantin von Hartmann, to inform Josh that Konstantin’s brother, Karl-August, had been executed for a part in the July 20th plot to assassinate Hitler. ‘He recovered his senses at the last moment,’ it ended. She hadn’t been sure what it meant because she still wasn’t certain of the ins and outs of this family she’d married into, but Josh’s mother had tried to explain.

  She was still a little afraid. She loved England for its old-fashioned manners, for the wigs and gowns its counsel and judges wore in court, for the banners, the titles, the sheer age. It had nothing to do with snobbishness, just with continuation. On the last day they had had together, Josh had taken her and the children to York and Ripon and solemnly shown her a trumpet in a glass case. It had had a fading coloured cord and looked very ordinary, but to Josh it had seemed like a talisman.

  ‘Trumpeter Sparks’,’ he had said. ‘With that he sounded the Regiment into action at Balaclava. There’s still a Sparks with us. He’s a wireless operator.’

  At York Minster she had stood beneath the tattered banners in the silence, involved in the mystique of history, struggling to understand why they meant so much, why they carried the names of battles on them to remind of all the blood and all the grief.

  Slowly, all the little pictures of men in the green and red and gold of the Regiment, all the portraits that hung on the library walls, had slotted into place. She had spent hours studying old photographs of shabby men in lancer uniform, standing by cookhouse stoves in the Crimea, in Zululand, in India. There was one of Josh’s grandfather looking incredibly like Josh, taken just after Balaclava; and one of Josh’s father in the desert after Omdurman with Winston Churchill, one in France with Ellis Ackroyd, wearing a steel helmet, and another in the Middle East, taken shortly before his death, wearing an Australian bush-hat. There was also one of Josh with Eddie Orne, both new recruits and looking mere boys in the full fig of the regimental dress uniform, complete with shapka and plume and swan-necked spurs.

  ‘They had it taken just after they joined up,’ Josh’s mother informed her. ‘Josh was seventeen.’

  It was part of his life Louise knew little about and she wondered if she could fit into it. But there were plenty of soldiers’ wives about to help her – Ellis Ackroyd’s and Sergeant-Major Orne’s. Even Josh’s mother.

  Rosanna was a fountain of knowledge. She was proud of Josh and knew who Marlborough and Wellington were. She knew that the Churchill tank had eleven bogies and that the Sherman weighed thirty-three tons and that the German Tiger could do twenty-seven miles an hour. She had even discovered from Sergeant-Major Orne how the Regiment got its nickname.

  ‘It’s the eagle,’ she explained. ‘They took it from the French at Waterloo. And to make it fierce they gave it big claws. They were also called the Widowmakers, and Goff’s Greens because they wore a green uniform and were founded by our grandfather. They ’ave another name, too – the Pot Carriers – because they captured Napoleon’s chamberpot at Waterloo and wore it on top of their flagpole.’

  It didn’t sound right but it seemed to have a grain of truth in it somewhere.

  The children took all of her time. She’d tried riding with Rosanna but she’d had to give it up because a new excitement had come and a new fear. She had found it hard to believe after the disasters with George but she was taking no chances. The impossible seemed to have happened and Josh’s mother was quietly pleased and kept her fingers crossed.

  For weeks the armies had struggled to break out of their restricting bridgehead. The Germans were fighting with a dogged fanaticism, digging in every bit of the way back, going to ground in elaborate earthworks which could withstand all the bombs and shells that were thrown at them, then climbing up to man their guns again. Ideal for defence, the country was terrible for the attackers.

  It was a perfect evening, warm and still as it had been since the end of the gales of the invasion. A truck had just brought up mail and everywhere Josh looked men sat with their letters in their hands. For himself there were several, one from Wightman, the solicitor, informing him what was being done at Braxby in his name and the cost, and expressing the hope that he was well and safe, and one from his mother telling him of her delight in Louise.

  There was also a letter from Rosanna informing him about her progress as a horsewoman. It included a photograph of her in the saddle, and a note from Orne confirming her boasts. The last letter was from Louise and the tail made him sit bolt upright.

  ‘Josh, I am pregnant. The doctor confirmed it this morning…’

  He could barely see the next few lines telling him of her delight and disbelief.

  ‘…Perhaps George was wrong,’ she wrote. ‘Perhaps it wasn’t my fault. Perhaps even the child he boasted about wasn’t his, after all. Judging by some of the women I saw him with, it probably wasn’t. But perhaps this is too unkind. Perhaps it’s simply because I was unhappy with him and now I couldn’t be happier.’

  He could scarcely believe his eyes. It was something that had often occupied his thoughts, because, though he now had children, they were both girls who would marry and go elsewhere to live, and the idea of another Goff at Braxby pleased him enormously. If anything happened to him, Braxby would now remain in the family because his Uncle Robert would no longer be the only ‘true’ Goff.

  For the rest of the evening, he sat outside his headquarters ten-tonner, smoking as the summer twilight turned to dusk. His mind was full of the future, and what he intended to do. Should he retire when the fighting ended? He had commanded his own regiment, which was the height of a soldier’s ambition, and could do it now without rancour or any sort of chip on his shoulder. The army would be reduced after the war and he suspected that England would be a great deal poorer, yet behind him he had twenty years which he would never willingly have given to any other profession.

  He had travelled widely and made friends with all kinds and classes of men, yet he had never consciously decided to become a soldier; he had just assumed he could never be anything else. And in the same way that his grandfather had once said the 19th wasn’t a regiment but a religion, he’d never thought of himself as being in the army, only of being in the 19th Lancers.

  He had even been lucky with the women in his life. Though the memories were precious, not all of them were happy, but he had had a splendid grandmother and mother, Ailsa had been a good wife. And now Louise had miraculously taken her place. Even Jocelyn had probably been good for him because they had come together at the right time and parted without bitterness.

  He was still thinking in the darkness when Rydderch appeared. He jerked his head at the headquarters truck and they climbed inside.

  ‘We’re off, Josh,’ he said as Josh handed him a drink. ‘At once. There’s to be a night attack with two armoured col
umns, one each side of the Caen–Falaise road. The leading infantry will be in carriers and you’ll be guided to the railway line by tracer shells from the light ack-ack and searchlight beams and compasses. Don’t waste time.’

  As Rydderch left, Josh called Toby Reeves over.

  ‘We’re off, Toby,’ he said. ‘There’s no time for anything more than a quick squint at the map. I’ll have to give orders on the move.’

  He outlined what Rydderch had told him and the squadron officers bent together over a map spread on a folding table. As the light began to fail, the silence was shattered by the roar of tank engines and the smell of grass was overlaid by exhaust fumes. As they moved forward, the air bombardment came down, incredibly accurate and seeming to merge into the gunfire flashes ahead.

  At eleven-fifteen they stopped, then, at eleven-thirty, began to move ahead again, forging slowly forward to bring them close to a new barrage due to open about a mile in front. When it did, the compass needle started swinging uselessly in all directions, and in the dense cloud of dust all they could do was follow the tail light of the tank in front. Everybody had been told to keep well closed up but it was a case of the blind leading the blind. Tanks loomed up out of the fog across their route.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ a Canadian voice asked.

  ‘19th Lancers,’ Josh said.

  ‘Never heard of you.’

  His head stuck out of his hatch, Tyas Ackroyd answered disdainfully. ‘We were founded about the time Canada was discovered.’

  A few minutes later a flail tank’s enormous jib clanged against the outside of the vehicle, then they began to see lorries and scout cars and could only assume that the infantry had got themselves lost. There was no sign of the Germans, just a couple of machine guns sending tracer out of the darkness, and how long the confused mass of vehicles milled around in the fog between the road and the railway it was hard to say. Josh fired a Very light to give his tanks their direction and before long, more tanks arrived, led by their commanding officer walking on foot.

  They were still trying to get their direction when somewhere ahead there were two flashes as German panzerfausts fired. The leading tank was hit in a shower of molten metal, and in the eerie light Josh saw figures running for shelter. A moment before the home as well as the weapon of five men, the tank was now a pillar of fire, the painted steel blackening, red tongues belching from its hatches and engine louvres, enormous coils of smoke lifting across the fields. Tremendous internal explosions blew sparks from every aperture and a rim of small flames jetted like a collar where the turret joined the hull. The adjutant arrived in a scout car, followed immediately afterwards by the doctor and the padre in a jeep. The survivors scrambled into the adjutant’s car and disappeared rearwards, while a man who’d been burned was helped to the jeep.

  It was now about two o’clock in the morning. The barrage had ceased and a thin moon was shining from a clear starlit sky. Deploying his tanks, Josh moved slowly forward again, spraying the hedges with machine guns wherever panzerfausts might be concealed. Germans began to appear from the waist-high corn, their hands in the air and Josh ordered his tanks to form a rough leaguer until they got reports on what the infantry were up to. After a while there was another flash and another of those familiar showers of sparks as a tank began to burn. A voice crackled on the radio.

  ‘Daisy Baker Two to Daisy Leader. I’ve been hit.’

  It was a bad moment. They were a perfect target in the moonlight and since the shot had come from behind they could only assume that somewhere in the darkness a German tank had been lying concealed. But there were no further brew-ups and Josh began to wonder if some nervous British gunner hadn’t let go by mistake.

  They remained where they were for the rest of the night and when the mist cleared next morning, it was another fine day with a cloudless sky.

  Ackroyd grinned. ‘I didn’t think there were going to be any more brews of tea, sir,’ he said, handing Josh a mug. ‘But here we are again.’

  ‘Sir!’ The radio operator’s hand appeared holding the earphones.

  It was Rydderch. ‘Well done, Josh. Bang on target.’

  Josh wasn’t sure what they’d done that had been so clever but everybody seemed satisfied and the sunlight was reassuring after the confusion of the night. He had been feeling weary, stiff and dirty, but it was a glorious morning that made him feel clean again, and the countryside ahead was fresh and unscarred after the shattered area round the beachhead and Caen.

  Two armoured divisions, one Canadian and one Polish, came up. They looked untried and clumsy as they moved past and, during the afternoon, they heard things had gone wrong and the two divisions had been stopped. Heavy bombers had dropped their loads by mistake among the packed columns and when the attack went in the Germans broke it up. There were now around a hundred and fifty smouldering tanks dotting the wheatfields near Quesnay Woods, and a German counter-attack had been launched. They were still only twenty-five miles from the coast and it was clear they were hoping to split the allied armies in two.

  Ahead, the sky was filled with smoke and the air shook with the noise of explosions. Typhoons howled down, squadron after squadron, and they soon learned that the counter-attack had come to a stop and was even moving back. To the west of them, the Americans had captured Rennes and Cherbourg and were now swinging towards Chartres and Orléans, the relentless pressure slowly forcing the Germans back.

  Without knowing why, they were ordered to push east, and they moved ahead in a compact group past the wrecks of the previous day’s fighting, the metal of the smashed hulls bright red with the oxidisation of combustion, the ground around them scorched in a circle among the green. Eventually they were stopped by gunfire that brewed up the leading tank. As the crew scuttled to the rear, Rydderch appeared.

  ‘Hold it, Josh,’ he said, scrambling on to Josh’s tank. ‘No need to get into trouble. We’ve got the German army surrounded. There’ll be targets for everybody before long. We’re pinching off their attack and, with a bit of luck, we’ll have the lot.’

  The air was full of the sound of aircraft as they came down in droves on the retreating enemy and smoke began to obscure the horizon. Then, from a rise, they saw a short section of the road from Argentan to Trun crowded with fleeing Germans. A squad of running men was overtaken by more men on bicycles who were overtaken in their turn by a gun limber drawn by horses out of control, then the whole lot was overtaken by a Tiger tank crowded with soldiers and travelling at a good thirty miles an hour, all of them with the one idea of getting away as fast as possible. Then a rocket hit the Tiger, flung off all its passengers in bloody shreds of flesh, and stopped it in its tracks, the flames forcing the horses off the road into a field where the limber overturned and brought them to a standstill.

  The sun was incredibly hot and the dry ground was so pounded by tracks and wheels it was like North Africa all over again. The dust was white and everybody’s hair seemed grey, so that they looked prematurely aged. Hordes of flies, bloated on the human and animal corpses, were everywhere, the mosquitoes bit even through the thickness of a battledress.

  ‘The buggers like the anti-mosquito paste,’ Dodgin said. ‘They use it as a sauce.’

  Nearby a line of German prisoners were being questioned by a Pole who looked round at Josh.

  ‘They tell me in Polish that they are Poles,’ he said, ‘and that their mothers were born in Poznan. So I start saying “It is a very hot day, isn’t it?” and still they say “I am a Pole. My mother was born in Poznan.” I wonder where all the Germans went?’

  A sense of optimism lay over the army. The sky seemed to be perpetually filled with allied aircraft and the troops climbed on to tank turrets and the cabin roofs of lorries to get a grandstand view of the holocaust ahead. To add to the horror, the corn which had hidden the snipers was catching fire everywhere.

  The Ca
nadians were still pressing southwards to nip off the German army’s salient but somewhere, despite the success, cohesion was disappearing and control of the fighting was being lost and the Germans were slipping out of the trap. Ordered forward near Falaise, from the crest of a rise they could see the whole valley below them crawling with Germans, an uninterrupted flow of vehicles and horse-drawn carts moving eastwards, all heavily loaded with men and materials, all forced to the pace of the weary horses. There was a gun, an ambulance full of wounded, a staff car, and, threading through the confusion, endless targets were revealed, and after four years of being on the receiving end there was an unholy joy in being able to give it all back with interest.

  ‘Daisy Leader to all children!’ As Josh shouted into the microphone, his voice cracked with excitement. ‘Choose your own targets!’

  The Regiment was soon banging away for all its worth and as ammunition ran short the ammunition lorries lurched up and the firing went on. The German column crumbled. Men riding on trucks and tanks vanished and flames and smoke began to lift into the smudged sky.

  The road was soon littered with smashed vehicles, the bodies of men and horses, immobilised guns and burning tanks. White flags appeared, sheets, towels or hand-kerchieves on sticks. From somewhere out of sight German shells and mortar bombs were dropping on attackers and Germans alike and the Germans began to scatter, leaving the wounded to die in the burning foliage.

  As the pocket became more constricted and confused the Typhoons and fighter bombers didn’t bother to choose their targets but fired their rockets indiscriminately. As the Shermans began to advance again, the roads were so choked by burnt-out German equipment it became impossible to move. The bloated carcasses of animals lay everywhere and in every spinney and copse there was a quota of German dead. It was a scene to which only Dante could have done justice.

  It was almost impossible to move without stepping on dead or decaying flesh, and to Josh it looked like one of those crowded battle paintings of Waterloo he’d looked at so often in his grandfather’s study.